(Free this week!)

Eating lunch in the courtyard at the Hammer yesterday, in advance of checking out the very compelling (of course) and sometimes disarmingly beautiful new Patty Chang piece, “Shangri-la”, I was starting to get all prickly about museums and art benefactorship and why isn’t this video piece more widely available (on DVD, perhaps; online; in more low-key screenings more places…), etc. But I love Patty Chang’s work, so I pushed my prickliness off and walked up the fancy stairs to the gallery where “Shangri-La” was showing. I’d missed the most recent start of it by about 10 minutes, so I had 30 to use before it started again.

And that’s when I completely unexpectedly stumbled right into Fiona Tan’s “Correction,” a series of 300 video portraits of people inside prisons. Featuring prisoners as well as guards, cops and other prison staff, the work — portraits are projected onto both sides of six large screens arranged in a circle, with benches in the middle and walking room around the outside — forced me beyond initial wonderings like “what happened to you?” “what did you do (or not do)?” and “why are you there?” and into more basic reckonings with the mysterious and the familiar, the unknowable and the knowable, in other human beings. Without providing any information about the subjects other than their location inside a prison and their (often fidgeting, self-conscious) physical appearance, Tan’s work — I suspect precisely because of the lack of information given — provokes the viewer to see and imagine the viewed beyond the single fact of her/his being inside a prison, and somehow does this in a way that doesn’t (for me, at least) tend toward an other-ing of the subjects or an egocentric/projecting imagining of them. Instead, it sort of pushed me past all my own immediate projections and asked me to just sit and stare and give these people’s possibilities some space. It’s one of the most humanizing pieces of art I’ve encountered in a long while.

I highly encourage folks in the LA area to check it out (and Patty Chang, too, while you’re at it).

Free every day through 9/4. Free Thursday evenings through 10/16.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 at 10:16 am by Jessica. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.